How blockchain technology could be used for social good
Source: Paul Forrest Linkedin
What is blockchain?
Today our social and economic lives rely on trust, and depend on intermediaries for transactions. For example, we transfer money through our bank, we need agencies to buy and sell property, or need lawyers for trade negotiations. Blockchain has the capacity to do all of the above work since it is more of a cloud-based peer to peer ledger to verify your existence, clearing transactions, tracking, proving ownership, or anything in the form of exchange between two parties.
The theory of how blockchain works is that it maintains transparency through the use of a ledger that tracks where the transactions have been. Each transaction is a block and a series of blocks becomes a chain of blocks. Blocks are also linked to each other in the linear, chronological order using a hash to prove the work of blockchain.
How can blockchain disrupt the social sector?
When the government-backed charity Kids Company was shut down by the Charities Commission, questions were asked of their management, but also of their transparency. Charities that get public funding would possibly get into the problem of transparency if the fund were not audited by the public sector.
Therefore, it is likely that the future for charities is moving towards transparency, which blockchain has a huge potential to offer – it could provide an early warning for breaches to reduce escalation in problem. Transparency, trust, security, and record keeping are the keys of the blockchain.
The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) recently published “Block and Tackle: Using blockchain technology to create and regulate civil society organisations”and has highlighted ways that blockchain could help out, including verifying trustees – by using automated background checks for individual trustees and real-time reporting – if all transactions were recorded and available online to the public, so charities would not need the annual reporting and many other points can be found in the full report.
Blockchain technology can also be used for innovative social projects in many areas such as decentralised and cloud services for healthcare support, patient records, supporting microfinance transitions and guarantees, cloud-based learning and much more. A particularly innovative example is distributing aid in refugee camps by Irish start-up Aid:tech.
2016 will be the year for blockchain technology to start being use in implementing projects and the year to see the real outcomes or online security and digital activity challenges – we have to wait and see!